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Culture Change at Google
341–350 of 520 posts
Re: Culture Change at Google
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only people experiencing offense here seem to be the ones who don't like the term child raiser for some reason.
For one, I have never heard the term "child raiser" in my life so I assume its even more confusing for those with english as a second language. It also just sounds so emotionless, like children are cattle. I'm really struggling to see what is gained by not using parent. For all intents and purposes, people use the term parent for those raising a child.
Agreed. I don’t mind the term, but it also sounds emotionless to me, like corporate speech. Something I’d expect in a press release.
I’m not a native speaker.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#343Re: Culture Change at Google
#344Re: Culture Change at Google
#345I worked at Google from the early(-ish) days up till 2019. My hot take is that the employees broke the social contract first. Sundar "MBA" Pichai is not the cause, he's the effect.
The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe menus and banning words like "deficient" and "all hands" than doing things users cared about. They cared more about working three days a week than delivering a project. And they still expected to be paid top 5% of the market and to get pats on the back for being amazing and oh-so-smart.
By the time I left, it was normal to see a team of 10 people taking a year to deliver something that would've taken me a month on my own in 2012. Something had to give. It's justified to give employees rock star treatment when they are actually 5-10x more productive than their peers at Microsoft. When they're less productive, you have to ask yourself "am I being taken for a ride?"
I think it's not unlikely that Sundar's mission statement from the founders was explicitly to get rid of this culture. It's clear he doesn't want or know how to turn the current Google into the innovative, bright eyed tech company it used to be. So the next best thing is to turn it into Oracle.
But the Google of ~2015 deserved to die.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#346There's a lot to like here, but I do want to grumble about one blind spot: > ... no more onsite dry cleaning or daycare. But again, these things weren't the reasons Googlers came to work. No big deal. Those are not the same. Onsite dry cleaning is probably not a big deal. If you are the primary carer for a young child and want to work, daycare is an absolutely massive deal. Whether you can combine 'carer' and 'career…
Relatively few people were able to take advantage of the on-site daycare because of long waitlists and exorbitantly high prices (sometimes as much as $4-5K/month). I remember when I first joined in 2009 there was a bunch of friction because new arrivals - those who had joined post-IPO and whose stock was then underwater - could not afford it, and so it was felt like it was a perk that went exclusively to pre-IPO Goog…
You had to pay.. 4-5k/mo for daycare, at work?
I don't know if they ever built it because I left prior but Rackspace was going/did add a daycare at their hq (castle) and as far as I know it would be/was free.. At least there was never any mention of cost before I left.
Big difference in number of employees but also massive difference in quarterly profits.
A lot of the younger child-free people were angry about it and wanted a bar or something added for them.
I've never worked anywhere with a daycare except a Golds Gym in high school so I'm not familiar with how they usually go.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did Google or Facebook do anything that is not "living comfortably off early success"? AFAIK they had a very poor track record in monetizing anything they built in the last ten years or so.
I think that's their point. If Google or Facebook had stayed with a Valve-sized team and stuck to their knitting, would they really have made any less money?
Would this preclude buying Instagram? That was considered expensive at the time, but I think was a great buy for them and is a significant part of keeping Facebook competitive now and for the next half-decade.
Facebook marketplace and groups are other successful (IMO) sub-products that might not get built if "stick to your knitting" was the mantra.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but if there's a pushback on a change, that's defense, not offence.
So, you are claiming they are "taking defense" not "taking offence"? Is this a terrible dad joke?
It is, but it's also a point - if something is being changed, pushing back shouldn't be assumed to be being offended. In some cases, the people doing the change will be offended if you don't comply. And that will keep going when the change is changed again.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was certainly executive-level pricing :) To answer your question, I don't know. The wait list was well over a year, and it was many many times more expensive than other childcare options in the Mountain View area, and utterly unaffordable for me on a senior SRE salary.
> to know that the cost and difficulty of arranging childcare is one of the things that drives people to exit the workplace and become stay-at-home parents, or perhaps part-timers in a less 'all-in' place than google. oh got it. Top comment made it sound like it was cheap/free of cost
Another comment in here says it could be up to 4-5k/mo. Idk about googler parents but thats pretty much an entire 2 week net-income paycheck to me.. IIRC my friends with kids pay something like 2-3k/mo I think for their daycare but I'm in CO not CA.
Re: Culture Change at Google
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Child raiser” is perfectly adequate to the context of a conversation about people who are raising children.
Wouldn't the employees of the day care be able to be considered as "child raiser" if I follow the meaning of the words?
No, because child care (aka day care) is temporary and optional. A person who is raising a child has taken responsibility for them through their childhood—metaphorically “raising” them up into adulthood.